YouTube announced in a blog post on Monday that it will be rolling out a few changes to surface more local and trustworthy news to viewers. As part of the Google News Initiative, YouTube will also start consulting with a working group of news organisations on making changes to their products to surface more verified news and context. For now, this working group includes Vox, Brazilian radio station Jovem Pan, and the India Today group (via Aaj Tak).

TechCrunch reported that $25 million would be earmarked for the Google News Initiative as part of this effort to promote trustworthy news.

UI changes

YouTube will implement the following UI changes:

Context blurbs for topics with links to Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia:

Links to news articles for developing stories, since those are generally released before good video coverage is out.

Surfacing more local news, starting with the US.

Expanded ‘Top News’ section, and rolling out of the Breaking News section in other countries.

Fake News training in India

Google has partnered with three firms to train Indian journalists to fact-check news, the company announced last month. The three companies are fact-checking sites BoomLive and Internews, and news analytics firm dataLEADS. The search company aims to train 8,000 journalists in English and six Indian languages. A small circle of 200 trainers will first be coached by Indian fact-checkers like AltNews and Factchecker.in, and go on to train several more once their orientation is done.